Wednesday, 13 April 2011

I have already posted about RRS in an earlier post, this is not quite the same thing [over the last week and a bit I have been working a lot with RSS and it has rejuvenated my love for this often overlooked asset.]

I keep hearing a lot about RSS being dead, yes ... it is not rendered correctly in chrome [my favourite browser], yes it is not particularly 'cool', but I love RSS. But as I said in the title it is the gift that keeps on giving. As soon as you write a new post it gives you, automagically xXx amounts of free links back to your site, what is there to dislike? [well there are scrapers which steal your content from agregators, but if you are smart enough to link to yourself in every new post, it is the scrapers which give you a link ;)]

Really Simple Sindication is often seen as rubbish free links, but it can give you a boost [short term] so that search engines do pick up your latest news [well in my case 'ramblings' would be a better word], and what is more you only have to go near it once, set a feed up, then it keeps going, and going, and going...

It's not even spam, it is sindication, it is getting your content out there, it is getting links to the original source. I have never quite understood why people do not have easily accessible feeds on any site which is regularly updated, you are going without free linkage [and I fail to see the negatives in that]. Luckily there are places out there where you can make your own custom RSS feeds [I prefer instapaper, but there are others like open dapper, but ...], but it is not the same, they have to be manually updated, real feeds don't, there is nothing like a proper RSS ...

No, the only thing in the interweb that I like more than RSS are those mental little social networking sites which spring up all over the place [especially whilst in beta], but methinks that that is a different story, for a different post.

Thursday, 22 July 2010

What is happening with yahoo? What is it there for anymore? With the fact that yahoo and Microsoft [you won't catch me linking out to msn] will be working ever more closely together, does this mean that the yahoo search engine will just wither on the vine, with bing taking over all search between the two. Internet savvy people still find a lot of yahoo's facilities very useful, I have a yahoo pipe for my blogs, at the moment there is nothing quite comparable to siteexplorer, I certainly have a yahoo mail account [or two], and many websites are fundamentally linked to yahoo, disqus & flickr for example.

On another tack, I was looking at google sites the other day, interesting linking policy, it seems that on many of the sites it had nofollow links in the main text, except if you linked to anything google. I don't know if this is automatic or not, I have a website, but it's still empty, and will be until I get the time to put some nonsense on it.

New google images is a bit disconcerting at first, but after a day, I think I quite like it, maybe even prefer it!

I have to say I'm quite sad and get a bit excited when a new search engine comes out, so I am quite miffed by the fact that no matter how many times I have asked, the kids over at blekko haven't invited me for a shot. It's not there to really compete with google, but from what I read some of the functionality kicks the ass out of google's site commands for getting into serious SEO websearch, come on blekko, give us a shot!!!

In an addendum to a previous post, I came across another site which is great for syndicating your stuff, not only does 30 boxes give you a home URL with links to your homepage etc, if you submit a blog to it, it automatically syndicates it for you, fantastisch!!